The importance for a service provider (e.g., a television service provider) to continuously strive to provide an increased variety of content and options to its subscribers cannot be overstated. No doubt this is one of the reasons why television service providers provide different types of services to their subscribers including on-demand pay-per-view programming, a variety of subscription options for broadcasted programs, subscriber-defined controls such as parental controls and cable modem Internet access.
But still there are limitations to some of these types of service. For example, with on-demand pay-per-view programming a subscriber can request that a program be displayed on his or her television. But, the subscriber is limited to selecting a program that the television service provider has stored on one or more centralized servers. The number of programs that the provider can store on the centralized server(s) is limited by storage space on the server(s) and the bandwidth required to satisfy all of the requests from its subscribers. Regarding broadcasted programs that are included in a subscription with the television service provider, if the subscriber cannot watch a particular program and forgets to record it or did not realize that a program was broadcasted until after the fact, then the subscriper has to wait until the program is broadcasted again in order to view the program.
As discussed above, if a subscriber knows of a particular program that will be broadcasted, then the subscriber can record the program via a personal video recorder (PVR). PVR's allow a user to record a broadcasted program for later viewing. Unfortunately, the programs recorded on a PVR can only be viewed locally where the PVR is physicaly located.